Bonhoeffer: The London years

On my daily commute into work, I pass a small church. Right by the railway line, it is a post-war build, having replaced an earlier church that was destroyed by German bombing in the Blitz. The name stands out: Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche. 

After crossing London, I arrive at my office at a rather different kind of church building. Here, at the entrance to Westminster Abbey, the name greets me again. Above the Great West Door of the church there are ten statues of men and women, their names underneath. One, bespectacled and dressed in the robes of a pastor, an open book in his right hand and his other striking a pose as if in the middle of a sermon point, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in what was then Breslau in Germany, to an intellectual, middle-class family. After theological studies at the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, he first served a church in Barcelona and then travelled even further, to Union Theological Seminary in New York. 

In 1933 – the same year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany – Bonhoeffer moved to London where he became pastor to two German-speaking churches, including the congregation of that little suburban church I pass every day on my way to the Abbey. Before the war it looked very different, its steeple rising high above the tree-lined streets. 

After 2 years in London, Bonhoeffer returned to his native Germany. There, he increasingly involved himself with the opposition movement to the Nazi regime. He was eventually arrested in 1943 for his part in ‘Operation Seven’, a plan to help Jews escape Germany. He was passed between several prisons. In July 1944 an attempt was made on Hitler’s life.

But the plot failed, and the organisers were rounded up. Bonhoeffer was discovered to be a close associate of many involved in the assassination conspiracy. He was sent to concentration camps, first in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and then in April to Flossenbürg. There, on 9th April, just a few weeks before the end of the war, he was executed. 

Putting faith first 

As the title of a new film – Pastor, Assassin, Spy – suggests, Bonhoeffer is often presented in uncomplicated terms. He was, simply, a hero. He resisted Nazi evil and sacrificed himself for a greater cause. His extensive writings have since inspired generations of Christians in pursuit of justice. In 1998 he was therefore an understandable choice for the project initiated by Antony Harvey, a Canon of Westminster.

Installed at the Abbey, amongst ten ‘modern martyrs’, Bonhoeffer was set in stone as representative of Christians from around the world and different church traditions who, in the violence and turmoil of the 20th century, gave up their lives for their faith. 

Yet, in his own lifetime, Bonhoeffer was relatively unknown. He was a young man still in the early years of his ministry. There were far better-known church leaders and theologians within the opposition to the Nazis, such as Martin Niemöller or Karl Barth. For his own part, Bonhoeffer was deeply self-reflective, often questioning what difference he had made. Looking back from prison he wrote: ‘We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds… are we still of any use?’ 

Bonhoeffer was more interesting than a simplistic, heroic image allows for. He was a person who faced everyday dilemmas and wrestled with difficult choices. As the historian Keith Clements wrote, though Bonhoeffer’s statue stands at the Abbey, ‘he actually walked below, on the streets of London’. 

So what can Bonhoeffer’s time in London teach us about him? How can his story inform our own response to challenging times? 

Bonhoeffer arrived in London in October 1933 to begin work as pastor to the suburban, middle-class congregation of the German Church in Sydenham and the less affluent community at St Paul’s, Aldgate in the East End. In his first letters home he wrote about some of the challenges of adapting to life in England – London was beset by fog, his house was damp and bothered by mice, and there was turkey for Christmas dinner, not the goose or duck that formed the traditional centrepiece of German festivities. But London was not just strange customs and bad climate. It was also a training ground for Bonhoeffer’s future work.